


You'll Go It Alone

by yossarianlives



Category: Breaking Bad, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Post-El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25730617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yossarianlives/pseuds/yossarianlives
Summary: There's a man with a scorpion tattoo walking around Fairbanks, AK.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 32





	You'll Go It Alone

He has a routine. It's not set in stone, nor does it run like clockwork, but it's a routine all the same. 

He starts off the morning with black coffee, hot enough to scald. It burns his throat when he swallows. It's the sensations he needs, the more extreme the better. He can't be left alone with his thoughts.

To combat his wandering mind, he throws himself into his work. He scoured every thrift store and library book sale in a 40 mile radius for textbooks and manuals on woodworking, carving, whittling, and furniture making. It was his one solace in those early days. Spending every day living in fear, locking himself in his cabin and constantly looking over his shoulder when he ventured out. The work got him back into that zone, the one he wasn't sure he'd ever reach again. He felt like he was back in high school, pouring his heart and soul into making something he could be proud of. 

Slowly but surely, he unlocked the door to his past self's creativity and honed his craft. Started to show his face at local business expos, chamber of commerce meetings and so on and so forth. And so the town was gifted their first bespoke wood workshop. 

On his first foray into whittling, he made a rose. A small, delicate thing, beautiful when he painted it a deep, deep crimson, almost black. It lives on a sparsely populated shelf in his kitchen. He didn't realise it at the time, but it reminded him of her. Her aura, her light, her beauty. He tries to follow Ed's advice, tries not to think about the past - especially those days, but all it takes is seeing a bottle of her perfume at the drugstore, or seeing a pack of yellow bed sheets at Walmart.

He doesn't get much work done, on those days. 

Today however, is a respite from these thoughts. It's a Spring day, fresh and crisp. He can hear the dawn chorus. He feels a semblance of peace. He gets to work on his latest project - a rocking baby crib. He's registered to show at a local business fair. Most of his orders come from phone calls, his number sourced from the poster advertised on the local supermarket noticeboard. The majority of them are practical, pragmatic - a new banister to replace an old rotted one, dozens of uniform raised beds for a vegetable garden. He doesn't mind simple, as long as his hands get to work, but once in a while, something like this crib comes around and he can flex his creative muscles.

It's all but done, needing to be sanded. He's going to paint it white. He looks at it and feels an odd sense of nostalgia for something he'd never have. Did this represent the life his parents would've wanted for him? Neat little house in the suburbs, white picket fence, 2.5 children, carbon copy of their own American dream? The fantasy that their oldest son had all but shattered? Not for the first time, he wonders if they pretend he doesn't exist. 

Around midday he can usually be seen at the beat-up diner on the road leaving town. He has a usual order, and the waitress serves him his food in an easy silence. The man who frequents her diner at this time is not one for words. He always sits at the bar, never in a booth. It's as if it's a defence mechanism, his brain subconsciously protecting him from dredging up memories of other times he visited diners of this mold. He leaves after twenty minutes. 

In the late evenings, when he takes long walks through the hills, he thinks of a mother and her son. Her and Brock would've loved this, Brock running wild in all this space, entranced by the snow. 

He thinks back to post-coital fantasies, whispered to one another under the sheets in the afterglow. Desires to get out of the ABQ, get out of New Mexico. He wanted to go to Florida, Louisiana, out into the bayou, looking for the cryptids a stoned Badger had once passionately described to him. 

She thought bigger. She dreamed bigger, she always had. He had always admired her for that. She had daydreams of Europe - Paris, London, Berlin, Prague. Lists of museums, parks, landmarks. He wanted to see the world with her. A deep shame and anger burns in him with vehemence. She'll never see them. 

_Because of him_

On a basic, rational level, he knows it was his sociopath captor who walked up to her door that night. Who made the decision to pull the trigger. It was the devil himself that gave her name to the gang. He had ended things with a heavy heart long before anything went down at To'hajiilee. He knows this. It doesn't mean he believes it.

.

No body was found, he was declared missing. Sometimes he thinks this can't be right, surely they found something of him down there - he left a tangible part of himself in that subterranean cage, a part that will live there forever. In his darkest moments, he wonders if the torture, the beatings, and the humiliation was enough. Enough for him to repent for his sins. He'd live through it all again if he could undo everything. The man who was once Jesse Pinkman has been torn apart with such ferocity that Mr. Driscoll often wonders who that person was all those years ago. That person, who lived in Aunt Ginny's house, who drew outlandish cartoons and comics, played drums in Twäughthammer with his friends. This bothers Mr. Driscoll, and so he immerses himself into his woodwork with vigour. 

He's under no illusions as to how he got here. He knows he made choices. Choices that benefited him, that protected their operation from the DEA, choices that saved his life, along with life of the man who blackmailed him into all of this in the first place, on that balmy Autumn night a lifetime ago.

He felt nothing when they announced his death on the radio. 

That's not true.

He felt a volatile cocktail of emotions - angry, confused, frustrated even. Uncertain. How does one react to the death of a former teacher, business partner, abuser, judge, jury and executioner all in one? 

He tries not to dwell. His self worth has never exactly flourished, but at least here he's doing something he's good at, and this sustains him. 

But sometimes he still slips. He hears the bastard's voice in his head when there’s an error in his measurements, when he cuts himself on the saw.

Imbecile. Junkie. Nothing. Screw-up 

GO TO MEXICO AND SCREW UP, LIKE I KNOW YOU WILL, AND END UP IN A BARREL SOMEW- 

Sometimes he falters, and leaves the tools down for a few minutes. It was like that in the beginning, when he was a paranoid mess, still haunted by the spectres of what he had left behind. But now, more often than not, he dismisses these thoughts and presses on. The old cunt can't get to Mr. Driscoll, not now.

-

The Alaskan nights are wildcards. It gets easier, but sometimes he still spends them studying the plaster of the ceiling. It's not as if he's expecting mind-bending revelations and reflection. He simply allows himself to be. Tonight, he returns to the word of a mentor and a friend, 

_Only you can decide what's best for you, Jesse._

He hopes that he's honoured that piece of advice. 

\- 

Officially, they're looking for a mid-height, slim built man in his mid-twenties, blonde hair, blue eyes, scorpion tattoo on his right hand. Fortunately, the picture they're using is his high school yearbook photo, the young, almost elfin face in the picture bearing little resemblance to his scarred, haggard appearance now. 

The sun rises over the mountains. The heat of his coffee mug warms his hands. He's vigilant, but he doesn't fear the cops beating down his door the way he used to. 

And if there's a man walking around the town with a scorpion tattoo, well, no one has noticed.

FIN.

**Author's Note:**

> I remember reading somewhere that Haines was the town Jesse ends up in, but I couldn't find any mention of it on the wiki, so I just went with Fairbanks since I didn't want to lift someone else's idea, you know yourself.


End file.
